Hometown 📷

A few years before I grew up here.

The building on the right of the picture was “Rolie Clark’s sweet shop” as we kids knew it. It was actually a tobacconists and a barbershop. The archway next to it with the small child in it led to three houses, the middle one of which was ours (from about age eleven). You had to get past a very sad and angry dog (Scamp?) who was always chained up by our nextdoor neighbours. Our very elderly neighbours on the other side must yave thought they had dementia every time our cat stole the fresh fish from their kitchen.

Next building along was Arthur Clark’s newsagents, sweet shop, record and toy shop. This is where I had my first job as a newspaper boy delivering the morning papers before breakfast and school. It was great for reading all the back page football headlines and stories before I sat down with my cornflakes and Shoot! football magazine to memorise the starting elevens for all 92 football league clubs. It’s where I bought my first record Permanent Waves by Rush. Spirit Of Radio is still a favourite. It was that or Twelve Gold Bars by Status Quo, or Frampton Comes Alive! by Peter Frampton.

Swiftly moving on, next is (or would be) the NatWest bank. I will always remember answering the telephone at 11:06 am one sunny weekday morning. It must have been during the summer holidays and everyone was out of the house but me. Time for some serious guitar practice with my new massive amplifier and speaker cabinet! I’d just finished a mega feedback infused Jimi Hendrix inspired solo piece (think Machine Gun minus the virtuosity). As it says on Machine Gun’s Wikipedia entry:

Hendrix’s long guitar solos and percussive riffs combine with controlled feedback to simulate the sounds of a battlefield, such as helicopters, dropping bombs, explosions, machine guns, and the screams and cries of those wounded or grieving.

There’s no doubt that my version simulated the sounds of death and dying, and at 11:06 am as the last feedback was dying out and my ears were ringing, I heard the ringing of the telephone, which I duly answered.

“851611”

Hello. It’s the NatWest Bank. Could you please turn your, er, music down? We’re trying to work and we can barely hear ourselves think over your infernal racket!"

I’ve hated capitalism ever since.

In front of the bank was a bench for sitting on and a red phone box. The bench is where tough guy Peter Gissing walked by one day and just punched me in the face for no reason. This is why you don’t tend to find me just casually sitting around on benches.

The very narrow and short road next to the bank is, of course, Bank Street, which leads on to Church Street, which takes you past the Catholic church and down to the Anglican church opposite the grammar school and boarding houses.

The massive building the other side of Bank Street is “The Doctor’s House”, and there must have been some very nice flats above. My doctor, Dr Horsefield, was a known drunk, but he did save my children after “a cyst and and twist” left me looking like a lopsided Buster Gonad (“the boy with an unfeasibly larger right testicle”) and had me rushed into hospital for emergency surgery. The Doctor’s House is where I met my first black man, Dr Prasad (from Nigeria), and my first Asian man, the unfortunately named Dr Rakshit, neither of whom seemed to think there was anything wrong with having one testicle the size of a melon.

The policeman in front of the Doctor’s is presumably heading in the direction of the small child to arrest her for being out after curfew, or something.

Finally, next to the Doctor’s is “The White House” which was a mysterious restaurant and guesthouse. Mysterious because I never went in, and never saw anyone go in or come out.

In the foreground on the left is the Caistor Lion, a water fountain and statue of a golden lion holding a red shield commemorating sixty years of Queen Victoria (I had to look that up). It’s still there today, unlike the lamp post. When I was growing up there was a public toilet, which is where I smoked my first “cigarette”.

I can’t remember the last time I went back to Caistor other than a couple of recent drive-throughs to show my unimpressed kids. The place gives me the creeps.